With the world shutting down, we’re reaching into our archives and pulling some of our favorite stories from the SwimSwam print edition to share online. If you’d like to read more of this kind of story, you can subscribe to get a print (and digital) version of SwimSwam Magazine here. This story was originally published in the 2018 Year In Review edition of SwimSwam Magazine.
Anyone who swims knows just how much you learn about pushing your mental and physical limits.
So when University of Nebraska alumna Hayley Martin had the opportunity to not only donate a kidney, but climb Mount Kilimanjaro just weeks later, she was determined to do so.
“A lot of the doctors were really skeptical,” Martin said. “I have a person called an ‘advocate’ — both the donor and the recipient have one. If at any time I decided I didn’t want to do it, it’s her job to tell the recipient that I wouldn’t be giving her my kidney, and she doesn’t have to tell her any reason why or anything like that.”
But there was never any need. Martin, now 28, made good on an offer she first proposed offhand to a family friend as a teenager.
“In March of this year, I got a text from my mom asking me what my blood type was, and I kind of instantly knew it was about the kidney,” Martin explained. “And I said, ‘When does she need it?’
“Just one thing led to another, and it turned out that I was a match for her.”
Initially, Martin was asked to donate in July, but that would have made the planned September climb impossible. So she asked to move it up.
“They basically said, ‘Sure, can you do it next Friday?’” Martin said.
The surgery went smoothly, with Martin’s part taking about an hour and a half and the recipient’s 2 1/2. She was out of the hospital by 5 p.m. a day later, and save some adverse post-anesthesia side effects, she recovered easily and without taking any painkillers.
Her attention shifted to the upcoming climb.
“They told me that I would need to take several weeks off after the surgery, and I got cleared for regular fitness about 8 1/2 weeks after the surgery, which only gave me about 2 1/2 weeks to train up back up,” Martin said. “So I was walking my dogs a lot and trying to go for little runs around town.”
Given that Martin was living in the Florida Keys at the time, there was little hiking preparation she could have done pre-surgery. So to maintain her cardiovascular fitness, Martin swam Masters and used a stair stepper at the gym.
The climb itself was like nothing she had done before. Over eight days — six going up and two down — Martin developed pain in her hip flexors, just below her donation scar, and repeatedly asked to go back down as she, her brother, and her dad neared the summit with their guide.
“The six days up you only get to about 14,000 feet,” Martin said, adding that climbers need time to acclimate to the altitude. “And then the last day is this huge line of people just walking straight to the top. We woke up at 9:30 at night and then started climbing at about 10:30. We got to the summit at 6:48 a.m., and on that very last day I tried multiple times to quit. I kept saying that I couldn’t do it.”
As if that weren’t challenging enough, the stretch from the final checkpoint (Stella Point) to the summit is lined with protruding spears of ice.
“There are parts where it’s so narrow you have to lift your leg all the way up and over in front of the other and put one foot right in front of the other, and you have to pick your feet up above the spikes of ice,” Martin said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I would much rather do, like, 10x300s best average or any of these sets I did in college that I thought were the worst.”
She added: “I would do any of those in a heartbeat over trying to climb that mountain again.”
As the group crawled — sometimes literally — closer to the top, Martin begged her guide to let he stop, but he did not oblige.
“He suddenly forgot how to speak English and just kept telling me, ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ and, ‘No, no, keep going, keep going,” she said jokingly. “And it was like, ‘No, no, no, I want to go back down.’ And he just kept going. So I just kept following.”
And so they made it. But don’t ask her to paint a mental picture.
“When we got to the top, the air is really thin, so none of us really remember it that well. But I remember being there, and we all sat down. We were trying to take deep breaths and breathe, and everybody kind of started to cry, and turns out that that’s just a really natural reaction to low oxygen levels,” she said. “We were all crying, and nobody knew what for.”
But what inspired them to go in the first place?
“We actually planned this whole trip for my dad because he wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro before he turned 65,” Martin said. “Originally, this was kind of an ‘old guy climb thing’ and just because from March to June things for me move so quickly, we decided to turn into more ‘promoting living donors,’ because there’s a lot of misconceptions either about donating your kidney — like you can’t drink afterward, you can’t eat candy, that your diet completely changes.”
For Martin, that’s been far from the truth. Despite people warning her that she was too young to “destroy” her life, she made an informed decision and urged others to do so as well.
“Just everything that I’ve read, everything that my doctors have told me, was: ‘Your life’s not going to change hardly at all,’” she said. “You’ve got to be careful about going out and getting really, really drunk. But you know, other than doing things that you should already be doing at the age of 28 — taking vitamins and maybe not getting that drunk — your life doesn’t change at all.”
The former Nebraska record-holder’s swimming ability remains unchanged post-surgery.
“Now I’m back swimming again, swimming the same times as I was before the surgery,” Martin said. “They are nothing like the times I swam in college, but I’m still doing the same as I was before the surgery.”
Martin wants fellow swimmers — and others — to join her in ending the stigma of kidney donation.
“This whole Kilimanjaro thing just kind of worked out, but there’s things that people can do in their everyday lives to show people that it’s not the end of the world that you donated a kidney,” Martin said.
“In fact,” she said, “it’s pretty much the beginning of the world for somebody.”
Thanks for the trek!
The team at Climb Kili